The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility in Providing Signals to Employees with Public Service Motivation

Public Service Motivation (PSM) has long been associated with individual altruistic motivation and a desire to contribute to the public good. Empirical research has linked PSM with a number of outcomes, including job... [ view full abstract ]

Public Service Motivation (PSM) has long been associated with individual altruistic motivation and a desire to contribute to the public good. Empirical research has linked PSM with a number of outcomes, including job satisfaction, occupation sector choice, individual performance, organisational commitment and turnover.  Under the assumption that the impact of PSM on outcomes will be stronger when employees and employer values are aligned many researchers have included measures of person-environment fit as mediating variables.  In this paper we seek to add to this existing debate by taking account of employee perceptions of their employer’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities.  CSR refers to the relationship between a business and society and can encompass a variety of initiatives, including environmental, consumer, community and employees.  The CSR activities of a business signal to employees the norms and values of the organisation and can therefore influence how they identify with the business.  As such, a business’s CSR activities can play an important role in engaging employees with a high level of PSM, allowing them to more readily identify with and commit to the business and its objectives.

The analysis is based upon survey data taken from seven state-owned enterprises in South Korea (n=285).  We focus on three categories of CSR activities (employees, consumers and wider society) and the international PSM construct proposed by Kim et al (2013). Findings show that CSR activities focusing on wider society have a positive relationship with all aspects of PSM. However, consumer CSR activities were found to have no significant relationship with those aspects of PSM most associated with individual altruistic motivation (self-sacrifice and compassion), while employee CSR activities were found to have a negative relationship with the more public good aspects of PSM(attraction to public service and commitment to public values).  Our analysis also models the relationship between PSM and employee commitment, as mediated by person-organisation fit.  Findings show that each dimension of PSM has a positive relationship with commitment and is mediated by person-organisation fit.  To this model we add CSR as a moderating variable between PSM and person-organisation fit, thus creating a moderated mediation model. Higher levels of CSR activities focused on wider society are found to significantly strengthen the ability of employees with high levels of self-sacrifice and attraction to public service to identify with their organisation’s values.  Lower levels of customer CSR activities were also found to have negative consequences for the ability of employees with higher attraction to public services or commitment to public values to identify with the objectives of their organisation.   Overall, these initial findings lend strong support to the idea that the CSR activities of a firm can play an important role in engaging employees with a high level of PSM and enabling them to identify with the organisation’s objectives.